Token vs type fitness and abstraction in evolutionary biology

There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and yet there are more than twenty-six letters in this sentence. How do we make sense of this?

Ever since I first started collaborating with David Basanta and Jacob Scott back in 2012/13, a certain tension about evolutionary games has been gnawing at me. A feeling that a couple of different concepts are being swept up under the rug of a single name.^[1] This feeling became stronger during my time at Moffitt, especially as I pushed for operationalizing evolutionary games. The measured games that I was imagining were simply not the same sort of thing as the games implemented in agent-based models. Finally this past November, as we were actually measuring the games that cancer plays, a way to make the tension clear finally crystallized for me: the difference between reductive and effective games could be linked to two different conceptions of fitness.

This showed a new door for me: philosophers of biology have already done extensive conceptual analysis of different versions of fitness. Unfortunately, due to various time pressures, I could only peak through the keyhole before rushing out my first draft on the two conceptions of evolutionary games. In particular, I didn’t connect directly to the philosophy literature and just named the underlying views of fitness after the names I’ve been giving to the games: reductive fitness and effective fitness.

Now, after a third of a year busy teaching and revising other work, I finally had a chance to open that door and read some of the philosophy literature. This has provided me with a better vocabulary and clearer categorization of fitness concepts. Instead of defining reductive vs effective fitness, the distinction I was looking for is between token fitness and type fitness. And in this post, I want to discuss that distinction. I will synthesize some of the existing work in a way that is relevant to separating reductive vs. effective games. In the process, I will highlight some missing points in the current debates. I suspect this points have been overlooked because most of the philosophers of biology are focused more on macroscopic organisms instead of the microscopic systems that motivated me.^[2]

Say what you will of birds and ornithology, but I am finding reading philosophy of biology to be extremely useful for doing ‘actual’ biology. I hope that you will, too.

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Deadlock & Leader as deformations of Prisoner’s dilemma & Hawk-Dove games

Recently, I’ve been working on revisions for our paper on measuring the games that cancer plays. One of the concerns raised by the editor is that we don’t spend enough time introducing game theory and in particular the Deadlock and Leader games that we observed. This is in large part due to the fact that these are not the most exciting games and not much theoretic efforts have been spent on them in the past. In fact, none that I know of in mathematical oncology.

With that said, I think it is possible to relate the Deadlock and Leader games to more famous games like Prisoner’s dilemma and the Hawk-Dove games; both that I’ve discussed at length on TheEGG. Given that I am currently at the Lorentz Center in Leiden for a workshop on Understanding Cancer Through Evolutionary Game Theory (follow along on twitter via #cancerEGT), I thought it’d be a good time to give this description here. Maybe it’ll inspire some mathematical oncologists to play with these games.

Replicator dynamics and the simplex as a vector space

Over the years of TheEGG, I’ve chronicled a number of nice properties of the replicator equation and its wide range of applications. From a theoretical perspective, I showed how the differential version can serve as the generator for the action that is the finite difference version of replicator dynamics. And how measurements of replicator dynamics can correspond to log-odds. From an application perspective, I talked about how replicator dynamics can be realized in many different ways. This includes a correspondance to idealized replating experiments and a representation of populations growing toward carrying capacity via fictitious free-space strategies. These fictitious strategies are made apparent by using a trick to factor and nest the replicator dynamics. The same trick can also help us to use the symmetries of the fitness functions for dimensionality reduction and to prove closed orbits in the dynamics. And, of course, I discussed countless heuristic models and some abductions that use replicator dynamics.

But whenever some object becomes so familiar and easy to handle, I get worried that I am missing out on some more foundational and simple structure underlying it. In the case of replicator dynamics, Tom Leinster’s post last year on the n-Category Cafe pointed me to the simple structure that I was missing: the vector space structure of the simplex. This allows us to use linear algebra — the friendliest tool in the mathematician’s toolbox — in a new way to better understand evolutionary dynamics.

A 2-simplex with some of its 1-dimensional linear subspaces drawn by Greg Egan.

Given my interest in operationalization of replicator dynamics, I will use some of the terminology and order of presentation from Aitchison’s (1986) statistical analysis of compositional data. We will see that a number of operations that we define will have clear experimental and evolutionary interpretations.

I can’t draw any real conclusions from this, but I found it worth jotting down for later reference. If you can think of a way to make these observations useful then please let me know.

Dark selection from spatial cytokine signaling networks

Greetings, Theory, Evolution, and Games Group! It’s a pleasure to be on the other side of the keyboard today. Many thanks to Artem for the invite to write about some of our recent work and the opportunity to introduce myself via this post. I do a bit of blogging of my own over at vcannataro.com — mostly about neat science I stumble over while figuring out my way.

I’m a biologist. I study the evolutionary dynamics within somatic tissue, or, how mutations occur, compete, accumulate, and persist in our tissues, and how these dynamics manifest as aging and cancer (Cannataro et al., 2017a). I also study the evolutionary dynamics within tumors, and the evolution of resistance to targeted therapy (Cannataro et al., 2017b).

In November 2016 I attended the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Workshop on resistance, a workweek-long intensive competitive workshop where winners receive hard-earned $$ for research, and found myself placed in #teamOrange along with Artem. In my experience at said workshop (attended 2015 and 2016), things usually pan out like this: teams of a dozen or so members are assembled by the workshop organizers, insuring a healthy mix of background-education heterogeneity among groups, and then after the groups decide on a project they devise distinct but intersecting approaches to tackle the problem at hand. I bounced around a bit early on within #teamOrange contributing to our project where I could, and when the need for a spatially explicit model of cytokine diffusion and cell response came up I jumped at the opportunity to lead that endeavor. I had created spatially explicit cellular models before — such as a model of cell replacement in the intestinal crypt (Cannataro et al., 2016) — but never one that incorporated the diffusion or spread of some agent through the space. That seemed like a pretty nifty tool to add to my research kit. Fortunately, computational modeler extraordinaire David Basanta was on our team to teach me about modeling diffusion (thanks David!).

Below is a short overview of the model we devised.

Ratcheting and the Gillespie algorithm for dark selection

In Artem’s previous post about the IMO workshop he suggests that “[s]ince we are forced to move from the genetic to the epigenetic level of description, it becomes important to suggest a plausible mechanism for heritable epigenetic effects. We need to find a stochastic ratcheted phenotypic switch among the pathways of the CMML cells.” Here I’ll go into more detail about modeling this ratcheting and how to go about identifying the mechanism. We can think of this as a potential implementation of the TYK bypass in the JAK-STAT pathway described experimentally by Koppikar et al. (2012). However, I won’t go into the specifics of exact molecules, keeping to the abstract essence.

After David Robert Grime’s post on oxygen use, this is the third entry in our series on dark selection in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). We have posted a preprint (Kaznatcheev et al., 2017) on our project to BioRxiv and section 3.1 therein follows this post closely.

Identifying therapy targets & evolutionary potentials in ovarian cancer

For those of us attending the 7th annual Integrated Mathematical Oncology workshop (IMO7) at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, this week was a gruelling yet exciting set of four near-all-nighters. Participants were grouped into five teams and were tasked with coming up with a new model to elucidate a facet of a particular type of cancer. With $50k on the line and enthusiasm for creating evolutionary models, Team Orange (the wonderful team I had the privilege of being a part of) set out to understand something new about ovarian cancer. In this post, I will outline my perspective on the initial model we came up with over the past week.

Oxygen fueling dark selection in the bone marrow

While November 2016 might be remembered for the inauspicious political upset likely to leave future historians as confused as we are, a more positive event transpired in tandem – the 6th Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) Workshop. I was honoured to take part as a member of Team Orange, where we were tasked with investigating the emergence of treatment resistance in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML).

Unlike many other cancers where the evolution of resistance to treatment is well understood, CMML is something of an enigma as the efficacy of treatment flounders even though the standard treatment doesn’t directly impinge upon tumour cells themselves.  This raises a whole host of questions, and Artem has already eloquently laid out both why this question captivated us, and the combined approach we took to probing it. In this blog post, I’ll focus on exploring one of our mechanistic hypotheses – the potential role of oxygen in treatment resistance.

Spatializing the Go-vs-Grow game with the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about small projects to get students started with evolutionary game theory. One idea that came to mind is to look at games that have been analyzed in the inviscid regime then ‘spatialize’ them and reanalyze them. This is usually not difficult to do and provides some motivation to solving for and making sense of the dynamic regimes of a game. And it is not always pointless, for example, our edge effects paper (Kaznatcheev et al, 2015) is mostly just a spatialization of Basanta et al.’s (2008a) Go-vs-Grow game together with some discussion.

Technically, TheEGG together with that paper have everything that one would need to learn this spatializing technique. However, I realized that my earlier posts on spatializing with the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform might a bit too abstract and the paper a bit too terse for a student who just started with EGT. As such, in this post, I want to go more slowly through a concrete example of spatializing an evolutionary game. Hopefully, it will be useful to students. If you are a beginner to EGT that is reading this post, and something doesn’t make sense then please ask for clarification in the comments.

I’ll use the Go-vs-Grow game as the example. I will focus on the mathematics, and if you want to read about the biological or oncological significance then I encourage you to read Kaznatcheev et al. (2015) in full.

Chemical games and the origin of life from prebiotic RNA

From bacteria to vertebrates, life — as we know it today — relies on complex molecular interactions, the intricacies of which science has not fully untangled. But for all its complexity, life always requires two essential abilities. Organisms need to preserve their genetic information and reproduce.

In our own cells, these tasks are assigned to specialized molecules. DNA, of course, is the memory store. The information it encodes is expressed into proteins via messenger RNAs.Transcription (the synthesis of mRNAs from DNA) and translation (the synthesis of proteins from mRNAs) are catalyzed by polymerases necessary to speed up the chemical reactions.

It is unlikely that life started that way, with such a refined division of labor. A popular theory for the origin of life, known as the RNA world, posits that life emerged from just one type of molecule: RNAs. Because RNA is made up of base-complementary nucleotides, it can be used as a template for its own reproduction, just like DNA. Since the 1980s, we also know that RNA can act as a self-catalyst. These two superpowers – information storage and self-catalysis – make it a good candidate for the title of the first spark of life on earth.

The RNA-world theory has yet to meet with empirical evidence, but laboratory experiments have shown that self-preserving and self-reproducing RNA systems can be created in vitro. Little is known, however, about the dynamics that governed pre- and early life. In a recent paper, Yeates et al. (2016) attempt to shed light on this problem by (1) examining how small sets of different RNA sequences can compete for survival and reproduction in the lab and (2) offering a game-theoretical interpretation of the results.

Three mechanisms of dark selection for ruxolitinib resistance

Last week I returned from the 6th annual IMO Workshop at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. As I’ve sketched in an earlier post, my team worked on understanding ruxolitinib resistance in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). We developed a suite of integrated multi-scale models for uncovering how resistance arises in CMML with no apparent strong selective pressures, no changes in tumour burden, and no genetic changes in the clonal architecture of the tumour. On the morning of Friday, November 11th, we were the final group of five to present. Eric Padron shared the clinical background, Andriy Marusyk set up our paradox of resistance, and I sketched six of our mathematical models, the experiments they define, and how we plan to go forward with the $50k pilot grant that was the prize of this competition.

You can look through our whole slide deck. But in this post, I will concentrate on the four models that make up the core of our approach. Three models at the level of cells corresponding to different mechanisms of dark selection, and a model at the level of receptors to justify them. The goal is to show that these models lead to qualitatively different dynamics that are sufficiently different that the models could be distinguished between by experiments with realistic levels of noise.